Codex is one of the most infamous examples of slopware. Just having the window unhidden on my mac will cause it to use 100% of the GPU displaying the spinner message.

THE SPINNER MESSAGE CAUSES 100% GPU USAGE ON AN MBP M5!!

So any time you're waiting on the model (which is 90% of the time), your fans will be blasting (careful, don't use it on battery).

The issue is on github and close to 6 months old. Probably since the release of vibe coded junk. I would literally fix it myself but it's closed source for whatever reason.

There are many discussions about which model is better, or if vibe coding is even possible. I point you to the extent of what one of the most well funded, money flush, well staffed model making companies can do with vibe coding.

To me a screwup this bad (where the CEO has already made it clear they're now "focussing on coding") indicates that there's something truly broken in the company. No one on polymarket expects them to have a leading model any time soon for example.

It's a tragedy. The world needs competition to anthropic.

> Codex is one of the most infamous examples of slopware

Woah, let's not forget Claude code is right there

if we are at 10x with AI and near AGI or ASI, then how is it possible that these products (Codex, Claude Code CLI) are still such garbage?

shouldn't this "agentic AI revolution" have long solved this already?

no way they're over there saying "we are on it plz wait" or that "it's too much effort"?

> It's a tragedy. The world needs competition to anthropic.

I agree, though Sam Altman's company is the last option I'd want to replace Claude with. I would sooner exhaust every open model.

> THE SPINNER MESSAGE CAUSES 100% GPU USAGE ON AN MBP M5!!

This seems to be a common Chromium problem across tons of software. GitHub has the same issue with its spinners, VSCode as well.

Not only Codex, but I can't leave ChatGPT app in macOS open for few hours, because it will consume 60 gigabytes of RAM over time and crashes all the apps.

Mindboggling. Or can't use Google's AI Studio in browser because it takes 100% CPU.

Need to write own app for everything???

This software has been terrible for me. Burns tokens like crazy, and fails. Most times I try to use the browser plugin, it just says it can't use the plugin. When it does work, it takes minutes to click a button. Unusable workflow.

I ask to generate a png with an alpha channel. It can't. Instead, it outputs a chroma-keyed image, then generates a python script to remove chroma key (fails), then a js script (which also fails). Then my 5h allotment is up.

It's frustrating because if it worked as they advertise, it'd be an amazing tool.

Well thank you for your service. I thought about trying out Codex after the disaster that is Claude Code. I'll be fine without either one on my machine

Building an open source native swift version that doesn’t have that bug: https://github.com/Lore-Hex/Quillcode

This was fixed long ago, if I'm thinking of the same bug. It was stuck in an inf loop all the time the codex window was open.

To be fair with Codex, you can use any harness you want with it. Access is not gatekeeper by a crappy full of slop electron app.

So just move to PI, or whatever.

Claude on the contrary, forces all plan users to use their horrible app, which, if you ever dared to use cowork, only once, will run a 2GB VM on app start, no f's given. at all.

Not justifying it. But if you use the official Codex app, thats on you. If you use the official Claude app, it's because you are forced to.

Sidenote unrelated to the post: since the Fable thing, and after serious thinking, I moved to open source models. I still have the basic OpenAI sub, but then easy lifting is now done elsewhere.

I have exactly the same problem with Time Machine spinner on macOS. It even doesn't rotate.

Somewhere should be rare specialists with diploma who are capable of fixing such problems with waiting lists for years ahead.

I had the exact same frustration and switched to Pi and have had zero complaints

is it closed source ? i can see the rust code in repo contrary to the JS in claude code repo, are you mixing them up ?

Pi mono is the only true harness. Everything else is crap

Claude code (desktop) and Codex (desktop) are both absolutely dogshit pieces of software. I can't pick which one is worse. I'd be sort of ashamed to say I actively worked on them, regardless of how they can empower people. Cursor's new UI is similarly terrible. They're all slowly getting better, but too slow for my taste.

They are incredibly slow in unpredictable ways, eat up memory at an insane rate, and just feel like they were built with no regards for UX. Like they crammed together all the engineers with no idea of how to build a coherent and predictable UI and let them loose on the product without proper designers.

The other day Codex (desktop) was eating up 70GB of RAM on my machine. What had I done? Literally nothing. I opened it and let it update once.

Another one with Codex was when I had a specific conversation where no activity was happening and which would make the app spin up all of my CPU cores, rendering it barely usable. It would take seconds to react to anything or update the UI. The conversation wasn't even in focus!!! Restarting the app wouldn't help. After I archived it, it suddenly got better

Claude Code Desktop used to be so, soo, soo slow and eat up so much RAM. It was unusable for anything other than playing around when I first tried it. It also didn't communicate any of what it would do. Using it was like living in a world with no affordances, constantly afraid of interacting with them and being faced with some sort of destructive action. Still, it has definitely been improving in terms of the UI experience.

Cursor's new agents mode suffers from similar issues. Obscenely slow, hogging CPU without anything going on, breaking with existing UX patterns (some of them already well implemented in their other, more polished, previous version), confusing buttons and labels which don't explain what to do and that sometimes do destructive operations on your code.

My favorite cursor absurdity is that if you use their workflow to create a worktree and the worktree setup script fails, the following happens:

1. The agent has no idea that it failed, let alone have any logs of the failure

2. Often you yourself don't get access to the logs of what failed in that script. Don't ask me, half the time it just says it failed with no further logs.

3. When you do get the logs, you cannot copy them in ANY way. You can't even select them. I have had to resort to taking a screenshot to do OCR on it

I've also had cursor repeatedly have concurrency/race condition bugs when creating multiple worktrees in parallel. I have 5 tasks, I spin them up all together so they can create 5 worktrees and they crash with random internal cursor errors. Wasn't the point of this abhorrent new UI you've stuffed me with to enable parallelism?

It's like people aren't even testing the shit they ship. Which I guess they aren't.

I'm a big believer in AI and think it is changing the world and will continue to do so, but I almost get offended at how bad these products for which I am paying (sometimes quite a lot!) are. There's "move fast and break stuff" and then there's "build crap to call stuff".

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Let me guess, there's also a bug where they train on all our data?